December 16, 2017, brought some severe headaches to those who make a practice of denying that UFOs really exist. The New York Times published a shocking story about the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). AATIP was headquartered on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring and was managed by Luis Elizondo for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The Times article disclosed that the AATIP, which began in 2007, investigated reports of unidentified flying objects. The online edition of the Times story included gun camera videos of an encounter between a UFO and two Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets, dispatched from the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz. The event occurred off the coast of San Diego in 2004. During the opening moments of the first video, one of the pilots remarked that there was “a whole fleet of them” at the scene. This contrasts with the denialists’ claim that there was only one UFO observed. Of particular concern to UFO skeptics was this passage from the Times piece:

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered.

Beyond that, the Times reported that Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace had modified buildings “… for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.”

Skeptics and UFO debunkers immediately set about attempting to put the toothpaste back into the tube. Some news outlets and blogs followed the general theme of “nothing to see here – move along”. Some supposedly scientific sources published very un-scientific reports concerning the metal alloys held by Bigelow Aerospace (BAS). None of those reports were based the source’s own examination of any such metal samples. Similarly, the sources conducted no reviews of any BAS reports concerning those metals. Other attempts at pushback focused on the false claim that the $22 million study conducted by BAS revealed nothing.

On the other hand, George Knapp of KLAS TV News in Las Vegas pointed out that Bigelow Aerospace produced 36 technical reports and 38 other reports (some of which exceeded 100 pages) based on information gleaned from this project. Knapp also notes that Luis Elizondo has 24 videos from AATIP investigations. Knapp expects that all of those videos will be released.

UFO researcher Grant Cameron emphasizes that disclosure of the aforementioned Bigelow Aerospace project is just one of six efforts underway to reveal the latest understanding about UFOs. For several years, Dr. Jacques Vallee has been leading his own project involving the examination of anomalous materials recovered in connection with UFO incidents. In an August, 2017 interview conducted by Alex Tsakaris of the Skeptico website, Dr. Vallee offered this explanation concerning what his team learned about isotope ratios for some of those metals:

So, either it should be terrestrial, which we can find out very quickly, or it could be extraterrestrial, in which case you’d expect that it would vary by a few percent from the standard ratio.

Most of those machines are mass spectrometers and they are often used by geologists, among other people, who look at meteorites. Meteorites are extraterrestrial and they don’t have the same ratio of isotopes that you do if you pick up a piece of iron on earth. So they are used to looking at ratios that are a little bit different, but what we find are ratios that are 100% off.

April of 2018 brings the release of American Cosmic, a book by Professor Diana Walsh Pasulka from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. American Cosmic will raise immense problems for the UFO denialists because it will offer information about the involvement of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the reverse-engineering of UFO technology and the assimilation of that technology into products manufactured by aerospace industry giants. More important, Dr. Pasulka discusses her trip to a UFO crash site in New Mexico (not Roswell) where crash debris is still being collected for examination by scientists working within the appropriate specialties. She shares the explanation provided to her by those entrepreneurs that inspections of material from this site continue to provide the inspiration and direction for some of the newest technological innovations. Some of those products are already in use.

The recent revelations made by the team represented by Luis Elizondo are only the beginning of an evidentiary avalanche, which will overwhelm those who continue to deny the reality of UFOs. Meanwhile, the rest of us can enjoy the music.

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TheCenterLane.com offers opinion, news and commentary on politics, the economy, finance and other random events that either find their way into the news or are ignored by the news reporting business. As the name suggests, our focus will be on what seems to be happening in The Center Lane of American politics and what the view from the Center reveals about the events in the left and right lanes. Your Host, John T. Burke, Jr., earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College with a double major in Speech Communications and Philosophy. He earned his law degree (Juris Doctor) from the Illinois Institute of Technology / Chicago-Kent College of Law.